It's the usual Monday morning ragtag bundle of front-page news stories but if any theme can be identified then it would have a law and order tinge to it. The Guardian reports that a new study from the human rights organisation Liberty "piles pressure on ministers" over plans to extend the UK's 28-day terror detention limit. Terror suspects can already be held for longer than in any other comparable democracy, says the Guardian. The four-week maximum outstrips limits in countries that have also suffered al-Qaida-inspired terrorist attacks in recent years, including the United States (48 hours), Spain (five days) and Turkey (seven and a half days). The findings are released as MPs await the publication of a new counter-terrorism bill that will propose extending detention without charge beyond 28 days. Ministers have indicated they would favour a maximum of up to 56 days, but no government position has been made clear.

The Telegraph, meanwhile, focuses on youth crime and the warning from a Tory group that Britain is in danger of creating a "lost generation". Iain Duncan Smith's Commission for Social Justice claims that a "toxic combination of family breakdown and school failure" is creating a violent and anti-social youth culture. The former Tory leader is launching an inquiry that will study New York's success in reducing inner city crime and will attack City institutions for not investing more of their profits in tackling the poverty on their doorstep.

The Telegraph approves of Duncan Smith's approach, which, it says, is about treating poverty as a state of mind rather than an absence of wealth. "Poverty won't be ended by giving money to poor people," says the paper. Until other problems - family breakdown, truancy, drug abuse - are tackled, "we are bailing out the tub while the taps are left running". It likes the idea that, rather than the state getting too involved, "people should make the decisions likeliest to inoculate them from poverty, such as getting qualifications and getting married".

Qualifications and marriage are not necessarily an inoculation against a life of crime and perjury, however, as the Wrap is sure Duncan Smith's new adviser on penal reform policy, Jonathan Aitken, will testify. As announced by the Observer yesterday, the disgraced former cabinet minister is to be brought back into the Tory fold to offer a "worm's eye view of prison". The appointment is "baffling" to the Guardian's Max Hastings. Aitken is the living embodiment of 1980s Tory sleaze, Hasting writes, and we are looking at "rhinoceros-hide insensitivity" on the part of him, and Duncan Smith, the Tories' "chief turnip". His appointment shows the Conservative leader, David Cameron, is serious about investigating radical reform of the prison system, shrugs the Mail, although "there remain suspicions about Mr Aitken's much-vaunted contrition - humility and repentance were not words associated with him during his career".

The second part of the Conservatives' upcoming campaign on crime is picked up by the Mail. The paper reports that Cameron is to focus on Britain's low rate of rape convictions - the lowest in any EU country - and promise to tighten the law and make jail terms more proportionate to the crime. He will also argue that a "widespread cultural change" is needed, with children as young as 11 being taught about consent and boys being taught that no means no.

Lords are "exploiting a loophole on expenses", reports the Times. The paper says that peers can earn themselves an income of up to GBP48,000 a year by claiming the full daily expenses allowance for attendance in the House of Lords (covering meals, hotels, taxis, office costs and so on) without the need to submit receipts. An analysis shows that nearly two-thirds automatically claim the maximum almost every time they visit the Lords. For example, 359 of the 500 Lords claimed the full "day subsistence" of GBP78.50 on 95% of occasions or more. Some claim allowances regularly while voting infrequently. The payments are currently tax-free because they are "reimbursement of actual expenses" rather than a form of salary. Lord Onslow, one of the longest-serving peers, describes the tax loophole as "a very English compromise, dressed up with an element of hypocrisy which to a certain extent works". How hypocrisy and compromise sit with the taxman is another matter, however, and the Times warns that any discrepancy could lead to an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs.

The Independent has had a spate of mammalian covers recently and today it's the turn of the primates. A bewhiskered ape stares out and, as far as the untrained eye can tell, it doesn't look too happy. The Indy reports that, for the first time, scientists have created dozens of cloned embryos from adult primates. It raises the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos. The Oregon-based scientists are believed to have tried to implant about 100 cloned embryos into the wombs of around 50 surrogate rhesus macaque monkeys but have not yet succeeded with the birth of any cloned offspring. However, they may just have been unlucky - it took 277 attempts to create Dolly the sheep. The breakthrough has great significance and exciting medical implications, says the Indy, but it raises familiar ethical questions. Nonetheless, says the paper, while reproductive human cloning is certainly a worrying prospect, it is neither a reason to fear the research currently taking place, nor to panic. "Rather, it reinforces the need to build legal safeguards in our societies against the unethical application of these fascinating new scientific techniques."

The Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, has agreed to hold elections in early January but has warned they may be held under emergency rule. In what the IHT calls a "defiant" news conference, the general's first since he suspended the constitution, he refused to give a date for lifting emergency rule. He also declined to give a date for stepping down as military leader. He described his actions as "selfless", reports the IHT: "I found myself between a rock and a hard surface. I have no egos and no personal ambitions to guard."

Benazir Bhutto gave a guarded response, says the Guardian, by welcoming the prospect of early elections but saying that they would be "difficult" under emergency rule. However, the paper also reports that other "difficulties" lie in wait for the former leader who was kicked out of office for corruption and incompetence. She and her husband are waiting to hear if the amnesty on their corruption charges (eight counts of taking tens of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks) will be upheld in the supreme court, but they also have to contend with money-laundering proceedings in Switzerland and Spain, and a civil case in London involving an expensive Surrey mansion.

The Independent has little time for what it terms Musharraf's "phoney democratic overtures", but it also has little hope that his western allies will "live up to their democratic rhetoric" and join the paper in its condemnation of events in Pakistan. The response of Washington and London to yesterday's developments suggests that "they will turn a blind eye for the sake of convenience and perceived strategic advantage", glooms the Indy.

It is a case of stick with what you know and love for the Express (the Diana inquest - "it's a farce") and the Mirror (the McCann case) this morning, but the Sun ekes out the Prince Harry-Chelsy Davy split, first reported yesterday, for a another day. "Harry love split riddle," splashes the redtop, gnomically. The "riddle" apparently, is whether Davy, the "feisty blonde" Zimbabwean-born heiress, is quitting Leeds University and flying home to Cape Town because she is fed up with Harry or because "she was shocked by the freezing Yorkshire weather". If so, she clearly needs to read the Express more often to appreciate the true horror of a British winter. "Brace yourself ... fresh storms are on the way," warns the paper.

Hundreds of football fans rampaged in the streets of Rome after a policeman accidentally shot dead a Lazio supporter while trying to break up a fight at a service station. The death of the 28-year-old shop manager, described as a non-violent football fan, has "plunged Italian football into fresh crisis", reports the Times. In a gesture of mourning, the scheduled match between Inter Milan and Lazio was suspended and another game started late with the players wearing back armbands. This did little to appease the more aggressive and violent supporter groups, says the paper, who attacked the police with petrol bombs and missiles. Rome's Olympic stadium "looked like a war zone last night", says the Independent, "the chaotic and frightening conclusion of a day that began with an absurd death".

The Spanish-Venzuelan diplomatic relationship took a turn for the worse at the weekend, reports the Guardian, after Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's socialist revolutionary leader, described the former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist" at the Ibero-American summit in Chile.

The Spanish king, Juan Carlos, then "flashed a withering look" at the Venezuelan president when he was in mid-harangue and "uttered five words likely to go down in diplomatic history: why don't you shut up?" It worked, says the paper, for about two seconds. And Hugo Chavez's retort? "The king is a head of state like me, only I have been elected three times with 63% support."

>>> A UN human rights envoy today visited a prison for political prisoners at the start of an investigation into the number of people killed and detained when the Burmese junta crushed pro-democracy protests.

COMING UP ON GUARDIAN UNLIMITED TODAY

>>> Cambodian officials have arrested the Khmer Rouge's former foreign minister and his wife who were among the most senior cadres responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people in the "killing fields".

>>> The Conservative leader David Cameron is to give a speech calling for tougher sentencing for rapists.

>>> Commonwealth foreign ministers are to meet in London to discuss the political crisis in Pakistan.